BrightWhistle is a customer and patient acquisition platform that uses the Facebook Ads API and its own landing page optimization technology to lower acquisition costs for health care providers, as well as multi-location businesses. Currently a managed spend service, BrightWhistle has just raised $1.1 million seed round led by Hamilton Ventures to fund development of a licensable tool for marketing departments and their agencies.

BrightWhistle automatically generates special landing pages for every ad its clients run so those who click through immediately see relevant content that increases the likelihood of conversion.

Landing Page Optimization to Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs

Here’s how the company’s service works once BrightWhistle signs a health care provider client:

Websites are created for each of the clients doctors, locations, or products to drive organic leads and search discoverability.

Content pertaining to the client’s services such as blog posts from journalists and physicians is licensed and published to these sites.

A client’s Facebook ads are loaded into BrightWhistle, which optimizes them around click through rate and other ad metrics.

Landing pages incorporating the licensed content are automatically generated for each ad creative and targeting permutation.

These landing pages are published where they’ll drive the highest conversion, either as a tab app on the client’s Facebook Page, or on their website.

Potential customers see relevant ads, click through to a landing page of relevant content that qualifies the lead, and they fill out a form to use the client’s services.

This system can significantly reduce the cost of customer acquisition because ad clicks aren’t wasted by directing leads to one-size-fits-all landing pages that are irrelevant or located on sites that don’t facilitate conversion. Landing tab apps are focused on driving sales and immediate ROI rather than gaining Facebook fans for a client’s Page. BrightWhistle co-founder and CEO Greg Foster tells us, “Some people in the industry still think it’s just about Likes, just about brand building. I think that’s selling Facebook short on its potential to generate more customers and revenue.

Managed Spend Service Available, Licensable Tool to Come

The 8-person BrightWhistle team is based in Atlanta. Its board will be joined by Jamie Hamilton, managing partner of Hamilton Ventures, Emerson Fann, managing partner of Eastside Partners which participated in the $1.1 million seed round, and former Disney and Weather Channel executive Paul Iaffaldano. BrightWhistle will use the seed round to hire for its development team so it can finish building its licensable tool. Its sales team will also be expanded to court more health care providers and agencies.

The company was approved in February to join the limited set of Facebook partners with access to the Ads API. BrightWhistle now manages hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in Facebook ad spend for several clients that pay 10 to 15% of total spend and a per-site per-month fee. It can also handle Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn marketing. Once the tool is finished, it will be licensed to agencies that will integrate the developer’s cut into what they charge clients. Eventually, BrightWhistle hopes to license its tool directly to health care providers as a software-as-a-service.

With an performance-boosting customer acquisition service that could be translated from health care providers to other verticals, BrightWhistle itself could become a target for partnership or purchase. Foster tells use “We aren’t stupid. We want to find the best outcome for us and our investors. We may be the acquirers, who knows. Right now we think we’re in the place (the Facebook Ads API) where there’s the highest willingness for clients to pay.”